


Cigarettes in Five Hands

by thuvia ptarth (thuviaptarth)



Category: Maggie Helwig - Between Mountains
Genre: Gen, Yuletide, Yuletide2008, recipient:jae gecko
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-22
Updated: 2008-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-03 13:41:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thuviaptarth/pseuds/thuvia%20ptarth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Many thanks to Loligo for research assistance and cheerleading.  Any errors are my own.</p><p> </p><p>The structure is borrowed from Marguerite Yourcenar's <i>A Coin in Nine Hands</i>.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Cigarettes in Five Hands

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to Loligo for research assistance and cheerleading. Any errors are my own.
> 
>  
> 
> The structure is borrowed from Marguerite Yourcenar's _A Coin in Nine Hands_.

The sun wakes Daniel, late, because his room faces west; he lies still, reluctant to leave the warm nest of blankets, and a little confused, because the lack of an alarm going off says London but the boom and crack of artillery says Sarajevo. Then he remembers what day it is, curses, and fumbles for his glasses on the nightstand. The bedside clock blinks 4:36 at him, which only tells him the generator came back up four hours and thirty-six minutes ago. His watch says 9:47, which isn't great but isn't irrecoverable, either. At least he can be sure it's Sarajevo time; he never bothers to change it anymore.

Downstairs, in the lobby, his interpreter Alija is chatting with another reporter, someone Daniel vaguely knows, another stringer, English, former army, a little crazy, a lot manlier than thou; easier to take when he's got a regular supply of smack. Daniel can never remember his name, a defense, he suspects, against the sheer irritatingness of the other man, although in his darker moments he wonders if it's jealousy. The other man, tall, blond, imposing, could play a war reporter in a movie; maybe that's why he seems to see the war as a movie, something that shouldn't be able to hurt him. Or, Daniel thinks, we're all like that. He's left his flak jacket in his room again. Half the reporters he knows do the same. They have so much more protection than the Sarajevans that sometimes the little extra seems obscene.

_Hello, hello,_ and _excuse us, we've business to discuss_ and Bob or Bradley or Bill takes off. Daniel stammers an apology, but Alija waves it off. "I was reading, it was very pleasant until he came along."

"Not trying to seduce you away with better wages?" Daniel jokes, with an uneasy emptiness in his belly. Alija has been his interpreter since the first year of the war, when he thought he could still leave it. Before he had a mental map of the city in his head, he had Alija.

Alija scoffs. "Please, Daniel, what an idiot that man is. He's still outraged when snipers shoot at him. Outraged!"

"Of course," Daniel says dryly, "it's not _his_ war," and they laugh. "Look, I just woke up, have you heard--"

"Still on for noon," Alija says, shrugging, "if you can trust them to keep it."

"Well," Daniel says, "maybe. Maybe--" He stops himself from saying something foolishly optimistic, reaches into his jacket instead. "Anyway. Happy Christmas, Alija."

The presents are wrapped in bright paper, red and gold stripes, little tags, "For Alija", "For Yasmin", in Daniel's awkward script. "And this is, it's a Canadian custom, this is the Christmas bonus--" He's blushing a little. He hasn't wrapped up the cigarettes, only tied them up in red ribbon. The bow's sloppy.

"I have something for you, too," Alija says, and produces a bottle of plum brandy, tied with a much better bow. Daniel tries to refuse, Alija must have been saving it since before the war, but "no, no," Alija is adamant, "you would embarrass me, how could I tell Yasmin I accepted a present from you and had nothing to give in return?"

"Well, then," Daniel says, "well, then, let's share it," and they corral a couple of plastic cups and break open Alija's grandfather's favorite plum brandy and drink it down, waiting for the ceasefire in the lobby of the Holiday Inn in the second year of the war. "You're not supposed to drink till after two," Daniel says, muzzily, after the third cup.

"What rule is that?" Alija says, equally muzzy. "That must be some Canadian rule."

"Well, it's after two in Canada," Daniel says, and pauses. "Or before." It's been so long since he was home that he forgets how to calculate the time difference; England's easier.

"So it must be all right then," Alija says, and pours him another cup. "How was London? Good to see your girl?"

"It's good," Daniel says. "London's good." London feels like a dream, even when he's in it; more like a dream than his actual dreams. His nightmares of wandering Sarajevo at night, a confused haze of up and down and fire, all the street signs painted in blood in alphabets he can't read, those are almost like memories. Two years and all he can make out in Cyrillic is curses and _Beware sniper_. He's better speaking Serbo-Croatian than reading it, and he's not too good at speaking it.

At noon, the guns fall silent.

After leaving Daniel, Alija goes to the Markale. ("The war's off, so you're off," Daniel said, clapping him on the shoulder; Alija suspects he went upstairs to sleep off the brandy. He's an abstemious man, generally, Daniel.) Four packs of cigarettes will be enough to purchase butter, flour, eggs, and fine French chocolate, all of it except the eggs marked with the UNPROFOR seal. He hesitates over the herbs lying limp and green on the table.

"That's local," the stall keeper says, "an old lady from the University Department of Agriculture grows them in boxes in her flat, she tells other people how. She is going to drive herself out of business, I tell her, but will she listen?"

The mint smells so strong and fresh, like spring. Alija had intended to buy Yasmin something special, something silly and frivolous, but the package Daniel handed him is soft and crinkly, a scarf maybe, or a shawl. The package for him is hard and square, a book. ("If you don't like it, at least you can burn it for firewood," Daniel said, and would not let him open it at the Inn.)

Mint--Alija is not sure what Yasmin can do with mint. Make tea, maybe. Frosting for a cake. He adds it to his pile, then takes out the packages of cigarettes. The plastic wrap makes crinkling sounds against his fingers as he carefully unwinds the ribbons, then curls them up for his pocket. They will look pretty in Yasmin's hair. He gathers up his groceries, his luxuries, not least of which is the smell of spring.

At the end of the day, with the sun beginning to sink behind the mountains, Petar sets Nikola to packing up the stall and sits in the back to count out the profits. Thirty percent goes to Baldy for protection; of the rest, he must figure co-op profits for his neighbors who sell goods through him, minus his twenty percent cut, and the rest is his profit, to go back into new goods. He has been doing well lately. He's been thinking about buying fuel from the Ukrainians as well as Food from the French and the Swiss; the profit margins are higher, but the risk is greater, too. Baldy might seize the fuel--for the army, he'll say, it's always for the army, but the army is what the militia commanders want it to be.

The old lady who grows herbs stops by for her money. "In cigarettes today, not marks, if you please, Petar."

"Have you taken up smoking, Miriam?" Nikola is astonished. "It's so bad for you!"

Petar swats the back of his head and sets him back to folding up the table that makes up the front of the stall.

"At my age," Miriam says, "everything is bad for me. But no, I would like a present for a young smoker of my acquaintance."

"A present, hey?" Petar hesitates over his accounts.

"If it's not a full pack, I will pay you the difference." Miriam fumbles at her pocket. Her fingers are thin and crooked and always tremble; it is just age, not the embarrassment. But still, Petar thinks. But still.

"No, here," he says gruffly. He selects a nice package for her, European even, not local make, all its original assortment in its original package. "Happy Christmas, Miriam."

"Happy Christmas, Petar." She looks up behind him into the setting sun; perhaps her sight is too dim for it to bother her. There are advantages, maybe, to not being able to see.

"They are so beautiful, our mountains," she says softly. "I am glad that today at least I do not have to hate them."

It is dark by the time Miriam reaches home, but not the usual dark: there are people out, laughing and making noise and lingering in the streets unafraid. The children play the radio very loudly, rock music in foreign languages.

Miriam always eats dinner with the Pavelics now, when there is dinner to eat. Tanja came to get her, one day after the beginning of the war, knocking on the door and then opening it when Miriam didn't answer: Tanja had been, what, ten? Perhaps her siblings had still been with them, instead of sent away, Miriam can't remember. She remembers she had been sitting in the dark, because the electricity was out, and she had no candles, and no need for light. She must have been thinking about Gustav, because she remembers she said to Tanja, "I am so glad Gustav did not live to see this, no one should have to see this twice," and she remembers Tanja looked scared and went away and after a while her mother came in and said, "Come eat dinner with us, Miriam."

"Thank you, Senka," she said politely, "but I am not hungry."

"Come eat dinner with us, Miriam," Senka said again, and she waited there for a long time with Miriam in the dark.

After dinner, Miriam gives them the presents she has bought and found and made: a guitar for Tanja, one of Gustav's books for Boris, who had been a professor of literature at the university when the university was still open, and for Senka the pack of cigarettes. Senka turns the cigarettes over and over in her hands. Miriam places her hands over Senka's: the younger woman's fingers are so strong beneath hers, so tense. "You must smoke them," Miriam says firmly. "Or at least one of them. I insist."

"This is too much," Senka says, smiling uncomfortably.

"We need silly pleasures," Miriam tells her. "We need to be wasteful sometimes. We need ..." She sees that Senka does not understand her, that Boris is frowning, thinking, she is sure, what the family can purchase with cigarettes. Food. Notebooks for Senka. Something useful.

"In Auschwitz," and they all go still, because she never speaks of this, "In Auschwitz, we were not human. We were ghosts. We were numbers. How they treated us - there was nothing left over. There was nothing to be human with." She closes her eyes for a moment. "Here, at least, we are still human. We still have pride. We are people to each other. What we give each other, the little extras - we can still be human." She pats Senka's hands. "Smoke a cigarette, Senka. Be human."

Afterwards, because Boris is Catholic, they go to Midnight Mass. The cathedral is full, and full of singing. Cold comes through the cracks in the windows from the shelling, but the damage is not too bad for this part of town, and the cold is only sharp gusts; the press of bodies keeps them warm. Boris and Tanja go up to the altar for Communion; Senka, who is Serb Orthodox, stays back with Miriam. They are not alone: only about a third of the attendants are Croat, Catholic. The rest of them are here because their family and friends are; because this is Sarajevo, and they celebrate together. People begin to leave, holding their make-shift candles, bowls of oil and water with wicks threaded through cork: the lights bob through the streets like the headlights of very slow cars.

Senka turns when she hears a voice calling her name: not an old friend newly found, but a new one, a foreign reporter she met at the newspaper offices the other day. Daniel. She introduces him to her family, her husband and daughter and Miriam.

"The carols are the same," he tells them in broken Serbo-Croatian, smiling. "Not the language, but the tunes, they were familiar to me."

"Did you sing them in English?" Tanja asks.

"My favorites," he says, "yes, I did."

They step aside, the side of the street, an eddy in the stream of people, so many people, laughing, late. Senka breaks out her pack of cigarettes, offers Daniel one. He lights hers for her; he is so short he has to lean up a little. Their hands touch, a little warmth, their eyes meet with a little flirtation, nothing serious, a little comfort, like the rush of nicotine or the smell of cigarette smoke; then their hands drop away and Daniel backs up a step.

"Such a filthy habit," Boris says fondly; his attention is on the passers-by, his hand on Tanja's shoulder. Tanja is vibrating with excitement, chattering nonstop to Daniel about mass, about her friend Dzeilana's brother Kemal who has joined the army: she hasn't seen so many people gathered, so unafraid, for three years now, Senka thinks, and she wonders as she wonders every day if it was right to allow her to stay here, if she should have sent her to cousins in Split, to asylum in England. Senka exhales out the smoke, holding the cigarette away from her at the waist, and slips her free hand in the crook of Boris's elbow, leans her head on his shoulder. Boris leans his head against hers. His skin smells familiar, sour, but sour like yeast or bread.

"Give me a taste of your cigarette, Daniel!" Tanja demands in English. "Mummy won't let me try hers."

Daniel begins laughing in the middle of an inhalation, then chokes, then laughs again. He may be a little drunk. "If your mother won't let you, how should I?"

Tanja frowns. "How," she says, "how," and Daniel tries again in his weak Serbo-Croat. Boris tries to help but his English is no better than Tanja's; Senka can't interpret because she is laughing too hardy, giddy with the smoke and the cold and the people and the cease-fire, and Miriam looks on, with the uncertain smile of someone who can't really understand what's being said, and must trust it's not meant to hurt them; and still they try to figure it out, Daniel and Boris and Tanja, the three of them with their two languages, as if all you need to talk to another person is good will and time.

The bombardment starts up again two weeks later.


End file.
